Inspired by the New Yorker article I read about neuroscientist David Eagleman (discussed here), I’m now about halfway his new book Incognito: Secret Lives of the Brain, which I find brilliant and fascinating. His style reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s — only even better.

One of his major premises in the book is that our conscious minds comprise the tiniest portion of what goes on in our brains:

Your brain is carved by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes are. And so is your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts. Our conscious minds are limited representations of the activity in our heads. Consciousness is the lowest man on the totem pole in the power structure of the brain. Most of what we do and think and feel is not under conscious control. … Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control.

Those of us who follow story know that our brains are wired to think in story form, but Eagleman sheds some light on this process that offers some fascinating nuances. Just a few examples:

“We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien [mental] processes running under the hood,” Eagleman writes. He discusses experiments with patients who have had the right and left hemispheres of their brains split from each other. “When one part of the brain makes a choice,” Eagleman writes, “other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why.”

Turns out it’s the left hemisphere that is the seeker of meaning, the sensemaker, the “interpreter,” the weaver of stories. The split-brain experimenters, Eagleman says, concluded that the “left hemisphere acts as an ‘interpreter,’ watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.”

Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

“The brain’s storytelling power kicks into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,” Eagleman asserts. In other words, your brain doesn’t need to come up with a story about how to ride a bicycle once you already know how to do it. Dreams, however, are another matter. “Dreams illustrate our skills at spinning a single narrative from a collection of random threads,” Eagleman writes. “Your brain is remarkably good at maintaining the glue of the union, even in the face of inconsistent data.” Think about it. The typical dream is full of wacky bits, but when we relate them to others, we do so in story form.

Unfolding brain research continues to shed important light on how story works at the core of our beings, even at unconscious levels to which we will never have access or control.